Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals are responsible for the forecasting, planning, and analytical processes that support an organization’s financial health and future. Going beyond the record-keeping of an accountant, FP&A provides critical support to the executive team and often reports directly to the Director of Finance or CFO.
In the AFP 2020 pre-conference workshop, FORECASTING IN UNCERTAIN TIMES, Carl Seidman, principal of Seidman Financial, provided attendees with both implementation-ready and theoretical approaches for improving forecasting accuracy.
Here we are – the beginning of a new year and nearly 12 months after the start of COVID. Some of you haven’t heard from me since the late Fall and after a busy end to 2020, I wanted to share some of my musings about where we are and where we’ve come from. I’ve put my thoughts together and reflected on how my attitudes toward work and life have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.
There’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as having to change when you don’t want to. Or perhaps to a lesser extent of discomfort, having to change faster than you’d like to. In March and April, many companies wavered as they weighed the possibilities of what might transpire in the coming months of Summer 2020. Yet, in the recent Fall months, they’ve increasingly executed upon what they believed would be their new realities.
Hey there, I’m Carl Seidman and welcome to a different kind of statement. You know that business and finance are changing faster than you’ve ever experienced in your lifetime. And they are not going to slow down any time soon.
Financial planning entails effectively defining and timing future resource deployments. Scenario planning is a technique used in FP&A to help guide companies through considerable uncertainty, contemplating various paths of possibilities. Despite our best attempts, our forecasts will have inherent errors; actual results deviating from the figures we had anticipated hitting.
We cannot know, with certainty, how the future will unfold for our companies. We are not fortune-tellers. Forecasts will almost always be wrong because they assumptions we make about the future will be incorrect and frequently change.
Non-financial managers bring much-needed operations focus into workplaces. Yet, because these managers typically lack strong financial acumen, it’s sometimes difficult for them to make strong business cases when they haven’t clearly identified the financial benefits.
Ten to fifteen years ago, I was a fraud examiner and forensic accountant. I was responsible for examining financial mischief. This included cash flow mismanagement, inventory manipulation, check kiting, and outright theft.
Business intelligence software is easy-to-use, affordable, and offers an alternative to running filtered pivot tables and pivot charts in Excel. The incorporation of data visualization platforms, such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI, are revolutionizing the ways in which financial information is presented.
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